We The 21st Century People – Introduction

Eleven score and nineteen years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all {men} are created equal.We are now engaged in a great political struggle, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.

The divisions are many, and seem irreconcilable; Rampant extremism has made “The Aisle” a barrier to negotiation and compromise, a barrier to the republican form of government promised by the Constitution. A canyon that threatens the country that so many have fought, struggled, and died to build and preserve.

This is how the Founders wrote (plus a bit of Honest Abe), and I have paraphrased them here to bring the mind of the reader back to the time of Enlightenment and the founding of the country. Now is the time for us to remember our origins and the thinking behind it: “The Great Experiment”. The Framers were familiar with the workings of government, especially the capacity for injustice and oppression when the few hold overwhelming power over the many. Sadly, few currently give the matter its due contemplation; accepting policies that may seem proper to them without exploring the truth or the consequences thereof.

In this moment, the wrong questions are being asked. Instead of listening to the propaganda of power-seekers and cronies, one must develop one’s own philosophy of what “a more perfect Union” entails.

“In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree. This indeed is not all that is necessary, though it be essentially necessary. An amendment of our constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over government must be shared among all the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate authority, the government will be safe; because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth: and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the people. In this case every man would have to pay his own price. The government of Great-Britain has been corrupted, because but one man in ten has a right to vote for members of parliament. The sellers of the government therefore get nine-tenths of their price clear. It has been thought that corruption is restrained by confining the right of suffrage to a few of the wealthier of the people: but it would be more effectually restrained by an extension of that right to such numbers as would bid defiance to the means of corruption.”

Unfortunately, the present distribution of wealth, coupled with its permitted application to the arts and edifices of politics, does indeed allow for mass corruption to a degree that actively supports the degeneration and corruption of government.

The first act of the Responsible Citizens who seeks to defend Liberty must be to Enlighten (educate) themselves on the fundamental principles of government. Recognition of the significance of the study of political science has faded from the public square in spite of its importance to liberty and the maintenance of good government. Some have even sought to undermine the teaching of political science. By doing so, they act to suppress independent and educated understanding of what a good government could and should be, as well as undermining democracy as a viable regulator of government.

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers (1)

To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

More than 200 years old, yet disturbingly relevant today.

Footnotes:

The “subsisting federal government” refers to the central government under the Articles of Confederation, which proved too weak to be effective.

The idea that societies of {men} are capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, free of the dictates of kings and bishops and entrenched aristocracy, is referred to as “The Great Experiment”. It, coupled with the principle of “rule of law”, was the foundation on which the Framers based our Constitution, and our Nation.